Harder to create viral posts now: Facebook (1081 hits)

The company is also making a handful of other major changes to its content moderation efforts

Bloomberg

Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Photo: Reuters

Facebook Inc. chief executive officer (CEO) Mark Zuckerberg said the company is taking more drastic measures to reduce the spread of sensational content on its site—by tweaking the news feed algorithm.

“People naturally engage with more sensational content,” Zuckerberg said on Thursday on a call with reporters.

“What we see is that as content gets closer to the line of what is prohibited by our community standards, people seem to engage with it more.” Facebook will now reduce distribution for that “borderline” content on the social network, Zuckerberg said.

The company is also making a handful of other major changes to its content moderation efforts.

Zuckerberg announced several self-regulatory measures, including rough plans to create an independent body by the end of 2019 to review appeals from users who contend their content was wrongly banned. Users also would get a new choice on whether they want to view “borderline content” in their news feeds, he said.

Facebook will also start to make public the minutes of its meetings on content policy. The company will release quarterly reports on how well its artificial intelligence works to identify content that needs to be taken down.

“I’ve increasingly come to believe that Facebook should not make so many important decisions about free expression and safety on our own,” Zuckerberg wrote.